“Feminism is the radical notion
that women are human beings.”
― Cheris Kramarae,
Women’s Studies Scholar
WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from August 1 through August 8.
The next installment of WOW2 will be on August 13, 2022.
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“As much as we need a prosperous economy, we also need
prosperity of kindness and decency.”
– Caroline Herschel, German astronomer,
first woman to discover a comet
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“Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity,
or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life.
Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you
want to live.”
– Mae Jemison, NASA Astronaut
first African American woman in space
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“We have a hunger of the mind which
asks for knowledge of all around us,
and the more we gain, the more is
our desire; the more we see, the
more we are capable of seeing.”
– Maria Mitchell, Astronomer and professor,
first American woman to be a paid professional astronomer
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The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
has posted, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.
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- August 1, 1786 – Caroline Herschel, German astronomer, discovers the first of her eight comets; the first woman to discover a comet. Herschel was paid 50 pounds a year by the British Crown as her brother’s assistant, which he insisted upon, becoming the first woman to be paid for her work as an astronomer.
- August 1, 1818 – Maria Mitchell born, American astronomer and academic, discoverer of a comet, first American woman paid professional astronomer; first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Vassar College professor of astronomy (1865-1888) – when she found out she was paid less than younger male professors, she insisted on and got a salary increase; a staunch abolitionist, she refused to wear cotton clothing until after the Emancipation Proclamation. Mitchell was also a suffragist, and a friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her journals and letters were published in 1896, and were reissued in paperback in 2008.
- August 1, 1837 – Mary Harris baptized after birth in Ireland, her exact birthdate unknown; she became the American labor organizer and rallying speaker ‘Mother Jones’ after her husband and children died of yellow fever; in 1902 she was called ‘the most dangerous woman in America’ because she was so successful in organizing mine workers and their families. Mother Jones was an activist for child labor laws as well.
- August 1, 1841 – Lilli Suburg born, Estonian journalist, writer, and feminist. As a girl, she suffered from erysipelas, a severe skin infection which disfigured her face, but during the time she was forced to stay at home, she became an avid reader and studied on her own. By 1869, she had recovered enough that she completed the examinations required to obtain her teaching certificate. Suburg established a school for girls in Pärnu (1882-1894), and published Linda, the first women’s magazine in Estonia (1887–1894). In 1894, she was forced to sell the magazine, and moved to Latvia, where she was the head of a school until 1907. She began working on her memoir after the school closed. Though recognized as one of the first feminists of Estonia and made an honorary member of the Tartu Women’s Society in 1916, she was unable to attend the first women’s congress held in Tartu in 1917. In her last years, she made periodic visits back to Estonia to see her sister Laura, and it was during one of these visits that she died in 1923, at age 81.
- August 1, 1865 – Isobel Lilian Gloag born in London of Scottish parents. British painter known for oil and watercolour portraits, posters, and stained glass designs; exhibited works at the Royal Academy of Arts, and was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the New Society of Painters in Water-Colours. She had suffered ill health since childhood, and died at age 51.
- August 1, 1888 – Aline Murray Kilmer born, American poet, children’s author, and essayist. Until recently, her work has been overshadowed by her husband, Joyce Kilmer. She was the mother of five children, but their oldest daughter was stricken with infantile paralysis and died at age four in 1917, shortly before her husband was deployed to France. Joyce Kilmer was killed in 1918 at age 31 by a sniper’s bullet at the Second Battle of the Marne. Aline Murray Kilmer turned to writing children’s books and publishing her poetry to support her four remaining children. Her second son, Michael, died at age 11 in 1927. Murray Kilmer’s works include the poetry collections Candles That Burn, and Vigils, and her essay collection: Hunting a Hair Shirt and Other Spiritual Adventures. Among Kilmer’s children’s books are: A Buttonwood Summer and Emmy, Nick and Greg.
- August 1, 1905 – Helen Sawyer Hogg born, American-Canadian astronomer and academic, who did pioneering research into globular clusters and variable stars. The first woman president of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (1939-1941). She wrote a weekly column “With the Stars” for the Toronto Star, and a column “Out of Old Books” for the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Hogg was a strong advocate for women’s careers in science; winner of the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy (1949), the Rittenhouse Medal (1967), and the Klumpke-Roberts Award (1983).
- August 1, 1910 – Gerda Taro born as Gerta Pohorylle, German Jewish war photographer, one of the first women photojournalists to be killed while covering the front lines of a war. She was opposed to the Nazi party, and joined leftist groups in 1929. In 1933, she was arrested and detained for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda; in 1934, she and her family were forced to leave Germany, scattering in different directions. She moved to Paris, and never saw her family again. She learned photography from Endre Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, and they became lovers. She went to work for Alliance Photo as a picture editor. They created the fictional persona of Robert Capa for Friedmann, but both of them submitted work under the alias, as it became more difficult for Jews to get their work accepted. The secret came out, but Friedmann kept the name Capa, and she adopted Gerda Taro as her professional name. While covering the Spanish Civil War, she photographed the bombing of Valencia and the Brunete region near Madrid, where her photographs showed that the Nationalist propaganda claiming control of the region was false. She was killed in 1937, accidentally hit by a Republican tank.
- August 1, 1911 – Harriet Quimby passes her pilot’s test, becoming the first woman in the U.S. to receive an Aero Club of America aviator’s certificate.
- August 1, 1911 – Jackie Ormes born, American cartoonist; first woman African American cartoonist in the U.S.; noted for the comic strips Torchy Brown, and Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger.
- August 1, 1912 – Gego born as Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt in Germany; Venezuelan modern artist and sculptor; because she was Jewish, her German citizenship was nullified in 1935, and she moved to Venezuela in 1939, becoming a Venezuelan citizen in 1952.
- August 1, 1916 – Anne Hébert born, French Canadian poet, novelist, and short story writer; she began writing poetry at a very young age, and by her early 20s, her poems had been published in several periodicals. Her first poetry collection, Les Songes en Équilibre (Dreams in Balance), published in 1942, won Quebec's Prix David. She earned a living in the 1950s working for Radio Canada, and the National Film Board of Canada. Hébert won Canada’s top literary honor, the Governor General’s Award, three times, twice for fiction and once for poetry. Her best-known work is her 1970 historical novel Kamauraska, which won the Prix des libraires de France, and the Grand prix of the Académie royale de la langue françaises de Belgique. Hébert died of bone cancer at age 83 in 2000.
- August 1, 1923 – Beatrice Medicine born, Standing Rock Sioux anthropologist, focused on the roles of Lakota women in changes facing their cultures in bilingual education, alcohol and drug use, domestic abuse, socialization of children, and identity needs. She is the author of Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining Native.
- August 1, 1926 – Hannah Hauxwell born, English farmer in the North Riding of Yorkshire. By 1961, she was working alone on her family’s 80 acre farm, Low Birk Hatt Farm, running the farm with no help after the deaths of her parents and an uncle. There was no electricity or running water, and she was struggling to survive on £240-280 a year (the average annual UK salary at the time was £1,339.) Life was a constant battle against poverty and hardship, especially in the long, harsh winters with temperatures well below freezing. In the summer of 1972, she was discovered by a friend of a researcher at Yorkshire Television who was on a walking tour. After hearing some of her story, the researcher spoke with one of the company’s producers, who decided to make a documentary about Hauxwell, which came to be called Too Long a Winter. After it was shown on television, Yorkshire TV’s phone lines and mail were jammed for days by viewers wanting to help her. A local factory raised money to fund getting electricity to the farm, and Hauxwell received thousands of letters and donations from around the world. In 1989, a second documentary was made, A Winter Too Many, which found Hauxwell better off financially, having invested in a few more cows, but finding each winter more difficult to endure than the last, and her strength and health weakening. The film showed her leaving her beloved farm after selling it, and moving into a cottage in a nearby village. She was invited to the Women of the Year Gala at the Savoy Hotel in London, which was also documented, including her meeting HRH the Duchess of Gloucester. In 1992, she was filmed leaving Britain for the first time, on a trip to Europe, which was so popular that another film was made in 1994, showing her visit to the U.S. The meadows of her old farm have been designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, now called Hannah’s Meadows, and managed by the Durham Wildlife Trust. She died at the age of 91 in 2018.
- August 1, 1927 – María Teresa López Boegeholz born, Chilean oceanographer, pioneer in marine sciences, professor of zoology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She was also a professor at the University of Concepción, where she taught courses in ecology, aquaculture, women and the environment, marine biology, and sustainable development. She did field work on ecologic projects in the Chiloé Archipelago, and was an advocate for women in artisanal fishing.
- August 1, 1933 – Meena Kumari born, Indian Hindi cinema actress, singer, and poet. She began her film career at age four as “Baby Meena.” Her mother died in 1947, when she was thirteen. Kumari continued to work, and got her first big adult leading role at age 19 in 1952’s Baiju Bawra, followed in 1953 by her Best Actress award-winning role for Parineeta. She made history in 1963 at the Filmfare Awards (for Hindi-language films) when she was nominated for all three Best Actress awards, and won for Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. She was subject to chronic insomnia, and began using brandy as a sedative, which led to heavy drinking when her husband became increasingly possessive and abusive, and they split up in 1964. In 1968, Kumari was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and received treatments in London and Switzerland. She wrote poetry under the pseudonym Naaz, and made a recording of her poems and songs in 1971. Three weeks after the release of her final film, Pakeezah, in 1972, she became seriously ill, lapsed into a coma, and died at age 38. Tanha Chand (Lonely Moon), a collection of her poems, was compiled and published after her death.
- August 1, 1946 – Fiona Stanley born, Australian epidemiologist, noted for research on child and maternal health, and birth defects; confirmed the benefit of folic acid in preventing spina bifida; her early work was on health problems among Aboriginal children caused by changes to their environment and traditional culture. She then studied in the UK at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and in the U.S., before returning to Australia to establish research programs at the University of Western Australia and within the health department, focusing on preventing instead of curing diseases caused by societal and environmental issues. In 1990, she was the founder and director of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research; a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences since 1996; recipient of the 2001 Centenary Medal; a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science since 2002; honored in 2004 by the National Trust as an Australian Living Treasure.
- August 1, 1947 – Lorna Goodison born, Jamaican poet, writer, and painter; she was born in Kingston on the first day of August, which is Emancipation Day in Jamaica. "I don't think it is an accident that I was born on the first of August, and I don't think it was an accident that I was given the gift of poetry, so I take that to mean that I am to write about those people and their condition, and I will carry a burden about what they endured and how they prevailed until the day I die." Goodison was the first woman to be appointed as Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017-2021). She has been honored with the 1999 Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica for literary contributions, the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Poetry, and the 2019 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; her poetry collections include I Am Becoming My Mother; Oracabessa; and Supplying Salt and Light. Goodison is also a talented painter, and the covers of her books are usually illustrated with her artwork.
- August 1, 1947 – Chantal Montellier born, French cartoonist, artist, graphic novelist, writer, political leftist, and feminist. She was the first woman editorial cartoonist in France, and a pioneering woman in comic books. In 2007, she and Jeanne Puchol, a cartoonist and graphic designer, founded the Prix Artémisia, named for the 17th century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, an annual prize awarded to comics created by one or more women.
- August 1, 1964 – Fiona Hyslop born, Scottish National Party politician; Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs (2011-present); Member of the Scottish Parliament for Linlithgow since 2011.
- August 1, 1964 – Augusta Read Thomas born, American composer and conductor; Chair of the Board of the American Music Center; in 2007, Astral Canticle was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music; in 2017, she was commissioned to compose Plea for Peace, music commemorating the first human-built nuclear chain reaction and its legacy.
- August 1, 1974 – Cher Calvin born, Filipina American television journalist, working for KTLA television in Los Angeles since 2005, and winner of six Emmy Awards for News Journalism. She speaks English and Tagalog, and participates in many Filipino and Asian community events, including a program at the Center for the Pacific Asian Family to help stop violence against women.
- August 1, 1980 – Vigdís Finnbogadóttir takes office as Iceland’s first woman president, and Europe’s first democratically elected female head of state, five years after the Icelandic ‘Women’s Day Off.’ This was a national strike for women’s equality in which 90% of Icelandic women took part, not going to work, and leaving the children and the housework for the men to manage, so fathers were unable to go to work either, virtually shutting down the country for a day.
- August 1, 1982 – Caroline A. Shaw born, composer, violinist, and singer; she won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Partita for 8 Voices, four interrelated a cappella pieces, and the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her five-part Narrow Sea.
- August 1, 2014 – The Council of Europe (COE) Convention to Prevent and Combat Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, also known as the Istanbul Convention, goes into force.
- August 1, 2019 – Khadijah Mellah, age 18, became the first jockey in Britain to ride in a race wearing a hijab under her helmet, which she won aboard Haverland. The Magnolia Cup, a charitable race at Goodwood Racecourse, was also her first race. Her journey from the multi-ethnic community of Brixton to one of Britain’s most famous racecourses reads like a fairytale. She had not even been on a horse before her early teens, when her mother saw an ad for the Ebony Horse Club, an outreach program for south London’s most disadvantaged youth. Oli Bell, an ITV racing presenter is a patron of the club, and arranged for her to take part in the Magnolia Cup. Mellah went through just two months of intense training at the British Racing School in Newmarket, but her coach was Hayley Turner, the Uk’s most successful woman jockey. Mellah said, “Haverland is such an amazing horse and I love him so much ... Ambitious women can make it ... I’ve had so much support, and I can’t wait to see other stories of other women getting into the industry and doing amazing.” Mellah began studying mechanical engineering at Brighton University in the fall of 2019.
- August 1, 2020 – Ryu Ho-jeong, who at 28 is the youngest member of the Korean national assembly, drew condemnation and praise after she was photographed in the national assembly chamber in what local media described as a red minidress, a vivid contrast to the dark suits and ties worn by most male MPs – triggered a flood of misogynistic comments online. On a Facebook forum for supporters of the governing Democratic party, a commenter said Ryu “looked as if she had come to the assembly chamber to collect payment for alcoholic drinks”, according to the Yonhap news agency. Other lawmakers came to Ryu’s defence, including Ryu’s fellow members of the Justice party, and other female MPs. In a Facebook post, Ko Min-jung, a member of the ruling party, thanked Ryu for “shattering the excessive rigour and authoritarianism” of the national assembly. Ryu said her choice of clothes was a challenge to male dominance in the 300-seat assembly, which has a record 57 women MPs after the April 2020 election. “In every plenary session, most lawmakers, male and middle-aged, show up in a suit and a tie, so I wanted to shatter that tradition,” she told Yonhap. “The authority of the national assembly is not built on those suits.” Ryu is part of a growing movement of South Korean women who are challenging outdated expectations of how they should appear in public. The “escape the corset” campaign is being driven by a backlash against exacting beauty standards that call for women to spend hours applying makeup and performing skincare regimes, as well as achieve a certain look by undergoing cosmetic surgery.
- August 1, 2021 – In the UK, Lauren White, a third-year student at Durham University in 2020, who had grown up 15 miles from the university, found herself being ridiculed and discriminated against, “At first when they mocked and mimicked my accent, I sort of went along with it, even laughed, but then when I persistently became the butt of jokes about coalmining and started to get called ‘feral’ because I was local it started to feel malicious.” She eventually moved back home, “I felt like I was forced out because it was constant. I wrote an article about my experience and it snowballed and I got inundated with messages from other students saying they had experienced the same as me and some even said they were too scared to speak out in seminars for fear of being ridiculed.” So she compiled “A Report on Northern Student Experience at Durham University” which showed that nearly one in five of the school’s employees and 30% of its students had suffered some form of bullying. And it wasn’t just the locals – a 2017 graduate, who came from Liverpool, had to go through counseling because of the bullying she endured, “I had the most horrendous time there [at Durham]. I’m from a working-class background. I was reminded of this every single day.” So Durham set up a bullying policy committee to address the problem. Nearly 100 Durham students and staff had reported bullying complaints between October 2019 and June 2021. Of the 76 that mentioned the gender of the complainant, three-quarters were women. Durham University Womxn’s Association said the university was failing to tackle a “certain culture” that “inspires and encourages condescension, belittlement, and mockery of women.” Since the committee’s founding, two people filed formal grievances against one of the prominent members of the bullying policy committee, Professor Adekunle Adeyeye, principal of the university’s Trevelyan College, accusing him of making sexist remarks, and frequently bullying colleagues. Three staff members had resigned, citing his behavior. A disciplinary investigation in July, 2021, upheld several complaints against Adeyeye, including possible misconduct or gross misconduct. Adeyeye stepped down from his role on the university’s bullying policy committee in July, 2021. However, the university has allowed him to remain as principal of his college. In September 2021, staff and students, including student leaders representing about 40% of Durham University’s student body, signed an open letter accusing Durham University of apathy towards bullying in response to Adeyeye's alleged conduct. As of July, 2022, he is still principal of Trevelyan College.
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- August 2, 1343 – Breton War of Succession: After her husband was beheaded for treason following a trial where no evidence against him is publicly demonstrated, and all his lands are forfeit (given by the king to her husband’s accuser), Jeanne de Clisson uses her own funds to outfit three ships, all black-hulled with red sails, naming her flagship My Revenge. She forms an alliance with the English as a privateer, becomes ‘the Lioness of Brittany’ and gains a fearsome reputation for personally decapitating captured French nobles, in her quest to be avenged against French King Phillip VI and her husband’s accuser, Charles de Blois.
- August 2, 1858 – Catharina van Rennes born, Dutch composer and music educator; composed music for the 1904 founding meeting of the International Alliance of Women/Alliance Internationale des Femmes organized by major campaigners in the Woman’s Suffrage movement in Europe and the U.S., including Marie Stritt, Millicent Fawcett, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Susan B. Anthony. The IAW is still in existence, and now has 41 member organizations, and consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
- August 2, 1870 – Marianne Weber born, German sociologist, author, and women’s rights activist; published her landmark book Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (Wife and Mother in the Development of Law) in 1907, followed by works on “The Question of Divorce” (1909), "Authority and Autonomy in Marriage" and "On the Valuation of Housework" (both in 1912), and "Women and Objective Culture" (1913); she was the first woman delegate in the federal state parliament of Baden in 1919, and chair (1919-1923) of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (League of German Women's Associations). After the unexpected death in 1920 of her husband, Max Weber, she was left a widow with four adopted children to raise, so she became a public speaker, along with her writing. All her public activities stopped in 1935, when Hitler dissolved the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, but she held a private weekly salon in her home.
- August 2, 1878 – Aino Kallas born, notable Finnish-Estonian author, who wrote in both Finnish and English; her trilogy, Barbara von Tisenhusen, Reigin Pappi (The Pastor of Reigi), and Sudenmorsian (The Wolf’s Bride) exemplifies her recurring theme of Eros leading to tragedy or death.
- August 2, 1894 – Bertha Maria Lutz born, Brazilian zoologist, politician, diplomat, and leading figure in the Pan American feminist and human rights movements; she sparked the lagging campaign for Brazilian women’s suffrage, founding the League for Intellectual Emancipation of Women in 1919, and the Brazilian Federation for Women’s Progress in 1922; Brazilian women won the right to vote in 1932; in 1933, she had obtained a law degree from Rio de Janeiro Law School, and went to the Inter-American Conference of Montevideo, Uruguay, where she introduced several proposals, including calling for the Inter-American Congress of Women to focus on gender equality in the workplace; in 1936, she became a member of the Brazilian congress, one of the few congresswomen at the time, where she presented an initiative to create a committee to analyze every Brazilian law and statute to ensure they did not violate the rights of women, but when Getúlio Vargas was reinstated as dictator in 1937, he suspended parliament, ending any hope of going forward with the project. Lutz was one of four women in San Francisco in 1945 to sign the United Nations Charter, and was vice president of the Inter-American Conference of Women (1953-1959), and continued to be an active member of the commission, advocating for the rights of indigenous women. In 1975, she attended the International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City, the year before she died at age 82.
- August 2, 1896 – Sarah Tilghman Hughes born, American federal judge, first woman to swear in a U.S. President, Lyndon Johnson, after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
- August 2, 1902 – Mina Rees born, mathematician and pioneer in the history of computing. She graduated Summa cum Laude with a math major at Hunter College in 1923. She earned a master’s in mathematics from Columbia University in 1925, where she also studied law. At that time she was told unofficially that "the Columbia mathematics department was not really interested in having women candidates for PhD's." She earned her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1929. She taught at Hunter College until WWII, when she worked as a Technical Aide and Executive Assistant with the Applied Mathematics Panel at Office of Scientific Research and Development. Rees became an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Council member in 1947. In 1971, she was the first woman president of American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was head of the mathematics department of the Office of Naval Research of the U.S. Rees was honored with the Public Welfare Medal, the highest honor of the National Academy of Sciences. For her contributions during WWII, she was awarded the (UK) King’s Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom, and the (U.S.) President’s Certificate of Merit.
- August 2, 1907 – Mary Hamman born, American writer, editor for Pictorial Review, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, and editor-in-chief for Bride & Home. She also worked for LIFE magazine, as the modern living editor, one of the “trio of formidable and colorful women” at LIFE, with Mary Letherbee, the movie editor, and Sally Kirkland, the fashion editor. They ran the “back of the book” for Ed Thompson, the managing editor; when he went on to found Smithsonian magazine, Hamman contributed pieces for its Back Page.
- August 2, 1914 – Beatrice Straight born, American theatre, film and television actress, who appeared on Broadway in The Possessed in 1939, followed by several productions of plays by Shakespeare, and won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance as Elizabeth Proctor in the original 1953 production of The Crucible. For her performance in the 1976 film Network, she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, which holds the record for the briefest performance, just over 5 minutes of screen time, to win an Academy Award. Her final performance was in the film Deceived in 1991. She was reported as having Alzheimer’s disease in her last year, and died from pneumonia in 2001 at age 86.
- August 2, 1930 – Vali Myers born, Australian artist and dancer; after leaving home at age 14, she worked in factories to pay for dance lessons, and became a leading dancer for the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company in the 1940s. In 1949, she moved to Paris, where she became a flamboyant fantasy artist who worked in pen and ink and watercolor, but also worked as an artist’ model and a nightclub dancer. Later she moved to Positano in Italy. Some of Myers' paintings have sold for up to $40,000 USD in New York. Her work is held in the Stuyvesant collection in the Netherlands, New York's Hurryman Collection, and is also owned by private collectors such as George Plimpton and Mick Jagger. But after she began having seizures, she moved back to Melbourne in 1993, where she opened a studio. She died at age 72 in 2003 shortly after being diagnosed with cancer.
- August 2, 1942 – Isabelle Allende born in Peru, Chilean ‘magic realist’ author; widely read and influential Spanish-language author of The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts; she became an American citizen in 1993. Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and letters in 2004; honored with the Chilean 2010 National Literature Prize, and the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Barack Obama.
- August 2, 1942 – Nell Irvin Painter born, American historian and biographer, whose field is American Southern history of the 19th century; her book, The History of White People, was a New York Times bestseller.
- August 2, 1943 – Rose Tremain born, English historical novelist, short story writer, and academic. She taught creative writing (1988-1995) at University of East Anglia, and later became the school’s Chancellor (2013 -2016). Tremain has been honored with the 1999 Whitbread Award for Music and Silence, the 1994 Prix Femina Étranger and the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, both for her book Sacred Count.
- August 2, 1947 – Ruth Bakke born, Norwegian organist, composer, and music theorist.
- August 2, 1950 – Sue Rodriguez born, Canadian right-to-die activist; after being diagnosed in 1991 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), she was told she had two to five years to live. She made the decision in 1993 to end her life, and sought the assistance of a doctor, which led to a legal battle, Rodriguez v British Columbia. She lost her case in front of the Supreme Court of Canada, but took her own life with the help of an anonymous doctor in February, 1994. Rodriguez is cited as an important figure in the eventual legalization of medical assistance in dying in Canada in 2015.
- August 2, 1955 – Anne Lacaton born, French architect; with her partner Jean-Philippe Vassal, she has designed projects in Niger and France, and co-founded their firm Lacaton & Vassaal in Paris in 1987. They often work on multi-unit housing for lower income families, advocating for design which prioritizes the welfare of a building’s inhabitants, and maximizing the flexibility of spaces, and often re-work existing buildings. Lacaton: “We went to places where buildings would have been demolished and we met people, families who were attached to their housing, even if the situation was not the best. They were most often opposed to the demolition because they wished to stay in their neighborhood. It’s a question of kindness.” In 2021, they were awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, for “talent, vision, and commitment.”
- August 2, 1967 – Aline Brosh McKenna born in France, American screenwriter and producer; noted for the screenplays for Laws of Attraction, The Devil Wears Prada and We Bought a Zoo.
- August 2, 2013 – Responding to the Supreme Court decision in U.S v. Windsor that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional, the U.S. State Department announces it will begin granting U.S. entry visas to foreign spouses of U.S. citizens in same-sex marriages, and visa applications of foreign same-sex couples will be considered jointly.
- August 2, 2018 – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern returned to work, following six weeks of maternity leave after giving birth to her first child, daughter Neve Te Aroha. "I feel like I've been gifted by the New Zealand public, by my team and with the help of the acting prime minister this time to be with Neve, which has been wonderful," Ms Ardern told TVNZ. "But of course, this is a unique circumstance and I'm really very keen to get back to work." Ms Ardern's partner Clarke Gayford, a television presenter, will be a stay-at-home dad, allowing her to focus on running the country. It is, she says, a privilege many other women do not have. "I'm very very lucky," she said. "I have a partner who can be there alongside me, who's taking up a huge part of that joint responsibility because he's a parent too, he's not a babysitter." She had said when she announced in January that she and her partner were expecting: "I am not the first woman to multi-task. I am not the first woman to work and have a baby - there are many women who have done this before." During her leave, she continued to read papers and consult on significant issues. She shared with the public a video of her rocking her daughter’s cot while dealing with a pile of papers.
- August 2, 2020 – Laura Codruta Kövesi of Romania began preparing to launch the European public prosecutor’s office (EPPO), the first EU body to handle criminal investigations. She made her name as the head of Romania’s respected anti-corruption agency, the DNA, going after government ministers and mayors, which made her very popular with European parliament anti-corruption campaigners, but her own government tried to block her campaign to become Europe’s first public prosecutor – until that government fell, in part because of her efforts. The new office will result in more investigations and more prosecutions, as well as a stronger defence of the rule of law in the EU, Kövesi said in an interview. “Our benchmark for success will be the citizens’ trust in our institution,” said the popular lawyer, who is stopped in the street for photos and handshakes in her home country. The EPPO, an idea 25 years in the making, allows the EU to bring cases of suspected fraud involving European funds and cross-border VAT fiddles to national criminal courts. VAT fiddles alone are estimated to cost national treasuries €50bn (£44bn) a year. Kövesi will run the organisation from Luxembourg, assisted by a prosecutor from each participating country, although investigations will be run by dedicated prosecutors in member states. Asked if she would hesitate to prosecute an EU leader suspected of misuse of EU funds, she replied: “Of course we will act … EPPO will be an independent prosecutor’s office and we will have to prove that the law is equal for everyone.”
- August 2, 2020 – Ann Oakley’s new book, Forgotten Wives: How Women Get Written out of History, was released on this day. Oakley has drawn on archives, biographies, autobiographies. and historical accounts to showcase four case-studies of women married to famous men, whose own accomplishments or the contributions they made to the work which made their husbands famous have been downplayed or erased: Charlotte Shaw (née Payne-Townshend) , Mary Booth (née Macaulay), Jeannette Tawney (née Beveridge) and Janet Beveridge (known previously as Jessy Mair).
- August 2, 2021 – Belarus Olympic sprinter Kristina Tsimanouskaya, age 24, was filmed arriving at the Polish embassy in Tokyo, where she received a humanitarian visa from Poland because she had been threatened with being repatriated to Minsk over her criticism of Olympic team officials. “Poland will do whatever is necessary to help her to continue her sporting career,” Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz, wrote on Twitter. The asylum application came hours after she was abruptly removed from competition. She had written on Instagram that team officials had failed to secure the necessary doping tests for her fellow athletes and then entered her “behind [her] back” into the 4x400m relay. Tsimanouskaya was taken to the airport by team officials, but refused to board the flight back to Minsk and sought police protection, indicating that she would probably seek asylum in the west. Her husband Arseniy Zdanevich fled from Poland to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, “I made the decision to leave without thinking twice.”
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- August 3, 1851 – Isabella Caroline Somerset born, President of the British Women’s Temperance Association; women’s rights and birth control campaigner (“sin begins with an unwelcome child”), and editor of the feminist magazine The Woman’s Signal.
- August 3, 1902 – Regina Jonas in Germany, first woman ordained as a rabbi; she spent two years at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she continued teaching and holding services. She also met the newly-arrived prisoners to help them recover from shock and disorientation. She was transferred to Auschwitz in October, 1944, and killed there. The date of her death is uncertain.
- August 3, 1905 – Maggie Kuhn born, American activist, founder of the Gray Panthers, advocate for human rights, rights for seniors, social and economic justice, nursing home reform and increased understanding of mental health issues.
- August 3, 1905 – Dolores del Rio born, Mexican actress and film star, regarded as the first Latin American crossover star in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s. After her busy career in the U.S. began to decline, she returned to Mexico and became one of the most important women in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1966, she was the co-founder with Felipe Garcia Beraza of the Society for the Protection of the Artistic Treasures of Mexico, which worked to protect the nation’s buildings, paintings, and other works of artistic and cultural significance. In 1972, she was one of the founders of Rosa Mexicano, which ran a day nursery for the children of members of the Mexican Actors Guild, and she served as the group’s first president (1970-1981), and a major fundraiser. After her death, the day nursery was named Estancia Infantil Dolores del Río (The Dolores del Río Day Nursery), and is still in operation. In 1972, she was a founder of the Festival Cervantino in Guanajuato, and made a series of television commercials for UNICEF shown throughout Latin America. In 1978, she was jointly honored by the Mexican American Institute of Cultural Relations and the White House as a cultural ambassador of Mexico in the United States.
- August 3, 1920 – P. D. James born as Phyllis Dorothy James, British author and Baroness James of Holland Park, a life peer in the House of Lords; best known for her Adam Dalgliesh detective series, but she also ventured into both historical fiction with Death at Pemberly, and dystopian fiction in The Children of Men. Among the many honours she received, she was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the winner of three Silver Daggers and a Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement from the Crime Writers Association.
- August 3, 1928 – Cécile Aubry born, French author, actress, screenwriter, and TV director. She adapted two of her children’s book series, Poly and Belle et Sébastien, for television.
- August 3, 1937 – Yvonne Kauger born, Associate Justice on the Oklahoma Supreme Court since 1984, Oklahoma Chief Justice (2007-2008). Honorary member of Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, founder of Gallery of the Plains Indian (1981), coordinator of the Sovereignty Symposium (1987) and co-founder of Red Earth Indian Arts Festival, which began in 1987. Active supporter of the Art in Public Places Act, and served as chair of the Art committee when the Oklahoma Supreme Court underwent extensive renovations, assuring that works by Native American artists were included. Inducted into Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame (2001).
- August 3, 1941 – Martha Stewart born, American founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a communications, publishing, and merchandising empire; television host of Martha Stewart Living (1996-2004) and editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living magazine, beginning in 1990.
- August 3, 1943 – Kate Krasin born, American artist who lived and worked in Santa Fe, noted for silkscreens, primarily of the New Mexico landscape and native plants and animals. For a single print she might use as many as forty screens, all cut by hand, to create a detailed, textured work of art. She died at age 66 in April 2010.
- August 3, 1949 – Sue Slipman born, British civil, human, and women’s rights activist; executive member of the National Council for Civil Liberties (1977-1979); founding member of the Social Democratic Party (1981); Director of the National Council for One Parent Families (1986-1995); a staunch advocate for women, especially single parents, she was a member of the Working Group on Women’s Issues to the Secretary of State for Employment (1992-1998).
- August 3, 1953 – Marlene Dumas born, South African artist, whose uses themes of race, sexuality, guilt, violence, and tenderness in her paintings. In 1985, she became one of three living women artists whose work had sold for over $1 million USD to that date.
- August 3, 1957 – Kate Wilkinson born, New Zealand lawyer and politician, Commissioner of the Environment Court since 2015; Member of NZ Parliament (2005-2014); Minister of: Food Safety (2008-2013), Conservation (2010-2013), and Labour (2008-2012).
- August 3, 1958 – Lindsey Hilsum born, English television journalist and writer; International Editor for Channel 4 News, and regular contributor to the Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The New Statesman, and Granta; recipient of the 2017 Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.
- August 3, 1958 – Ana Kokkinos born, Australian film and television director and screenwriter; her second short film, Only the Brave, won several awards; her first feature film, Head On (1998), won Best First Feature at San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; other feature films include The Book of Revelation and Blessed, which was an official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009.
- August 3, 1964 – Joan E Higginbotham born, American electrical engineer and NASA astronaut (1996-2007). She was the third African American woman to go into space, after Mae Jemison and Stephanie Wilson. Higginbotham logged over 300 hours in space with the crew of STS-116, operating the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS). In 2007, she was honored with the Adler Planetarium Women in Space Science Award.
- August 3, 1984 – Mary Lou Retton’s perfect 10 vault wins gold at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles CA.
- August 3, 2019 – Pania Newton, one of the leaders of SOUL (Save Our Unique Landscape) a Māori group that has been encamped for over 10 days at Ihumātao, is trying to save this site that is sacred to her people, from a private developer who has a deal to put up a housing development. Newton says, “To me, this land is the very essence of who I am, it’s where my identity lies. How much more do we have to sacrifice at the hands of capitalism, at the hands of the crown, before it is all gone?” She traces her ties to Ihumātao to the first Polynesian settlers in New Zealand, who planted market gardens to feed their people as early as the 14th century. “We have experienced ongoing injustices since Ihumātao was forcibly taken in 1863. Our ancestral lands have been quarried, our waterways polluted. We feel as though we have sacrificed enough for the greater good of Auckland, and all we’re asking for now is that this small piece of land is returned back to the guardians so that we can hold it in trust for all New Zealanders to enjoy as a cultural heritage landscape.” It is a matter of record that Ihumātao was seized by the crown in 1863 and sold to white settler farmers. In 2016 it was sold again to developer Fletcher Building, which plans about 500 homes on the prime site so close to the airport – made even more valuable by Auckland’s well-documented housing crisis. The chief executive of Fletcher Building’s residential division, Steve Evans, said the company has committed to returning 25%, or eight hectares, of land to Māori and would take due care of the site. In February, 2020, the disputed land at Ihumātao was granted the highest level of heritage recognition by Heritage New Zealand, which extended the borders of the Ōtuataua Stonefields reserve in Māngere to include the controversial whenua (sacred land - literally ‘placenta’ – from the womb of Papatūānuku, Earth Mother) This is a largely symbolic gesture as Heritage New Zealand is not a government agency, and has no power to grant any protections to Ihumātao.
- August 3, 2020 – In El Savador, a judge sentenced three police officers to 20 years each for the 2019 killing of 29-year-old Camila Díaz Córdova, a transgender woman. Prosecutors say the officers brutally assaulted her, then threw her out of a moving vehicle. Díaz Córdova had been deported from the U.S. a year before she was killed. The case marks the first homicide conviction for the killing of a transgender person in El Salvador.
- August 3, 2021 – British actor-director Noel Clarke has left his production company, Unstoppable Film and TV, which he co-founded in 2017 with Jason Maza, because of allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct from 20 women. The claims against him include indecent exposure, secretly filming a naked audition, showing sexually explicit photographs and videos to colleagues without consent, and unwanted touching or groping of women. Clarke has been a high-profile figure in British film and television since the early 2000s as an actor, producer and director, and received an honorary Bafta for his contribution to British cinema April 2021. But the award has since been withdrawn, along with Clarke’s Bafta membership, after testimony by the women. Sky Television, the BBC, and ITV all cut ties with Clarke, with the final episode of Clarke’s ITV series Viewpoint moved from linear broadcast to on-demand. Further allegations levelled against Clarke in May 2021 accused him of sexually inappropriate behaviour on the set of Doctor Who between 2005 and 2010. Scotland Yard says they are investigating the claims. One of his accusers, Gina Powell, worked for Clarke as a producer between September 2014 and March 2017, producing Brotherhood. She told the Guardian newspaper that Clarke would constantly harass her, on one occasion telling her that, when he hired her, he had planned “to fuck her and fire her” before deciding to keep her on. She also alleges that Clarke would brag about storing sexually explicit pictures and videos on his hard drive, including footage he told her he had secretly filmed during naked auditions. Clarke issued a statement, “In a 20-year career, I have put inclusivity and diversity at the forefront of my work and never had a complaint made against me. If anyone who has worked with me has ever felt uncomfortable or disrespected, I sincerely apologise. I vehemently deny any sexual misconduct or wrongdoing and intend to defend myself against these false allegations.”
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- August 4, 1470 – Lucrezia de' Medici born, eldest daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Clarice Orsini. She married the politically astute and ambitious Jacopo Salviati in 1486, and gave birth to 10 children, all of whom lived to at least early adulthood. She used her wealth and influence to support the de’Medici family as they went in and out of favor as rulers in Florence, and was a trusted advisor to her brother Giuliano, who became Pope Leo X. She was also a patron of the arts. Later, when her husband became a prisoner of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, she raised the ransom money to secure Jacopo’s release. She lived to the age of 83.
- August 4, 1890 – Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong born, first woman law professor at a major university law school, Boalt Hall, University of California Berkeley. Served on California Social Insurance Commission (1915-1919). Expert on social economics and labor law (PhD Economics 1921), author of Insuring the Essentials (1932). Served as chief of staff for social security planning of the Committee on Economic Security, and was major contributor to the Social Security Act. Her two-volume work California Family Law (1953) is regarded as the seminal work in the field.
- August 4, 1892 – Johanna Bordewijk Roepman born, Dutch composer, largely self-taught; noted for her orchestral piece, The Garden of Allah.
- August 4, 1900 – Elizabeth Bower-Lyon born, future wife of King George VI, Queen consort of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions; mother of Queen Elizabeth II. She lived to the age of 101, and was greatly admired for her indomitable spirit during WWII and her calm, cheerful public persona. As the Dowager Queen, she was often affectionately referred to as ‘the Queen Mum.’
- August 4, 1902 – Mary Alexander Cook born, UK physician, museum curator, and expert on Cape Dutch architecture. She married an Anglican minister, and they moved to South Africa in 1926, settling in what was the Transvaal at the time. She worked as a general practitioner until the birth of her son in 1931, then lectured on public health to nursing students in Pretoria. Dr Cook’s fascination with Cape architecture and decorative arts started during family holidays to the Western Cape. She did research in historic archives, and became known as an authority on the subject. She campaigned for preservation of Cape architecture and, from 1947 on, wrote regularly on the subject in journals and newspapers. In 1949, she was awarded the Historical Monuments Commission medal. After the death of her husband, she served as cultural historian (1958-1974) at the South African Museum, in charge of their cultural history collections. She died in August 1981 at age 78.
- August 4, 1910 – Hedda Sterne born in Romania, American Abstract Expressionist/Surrealist painter; along with sculptors Louis Bourgeois and Mary Callery, she was one of the three women members of “The Irascible Eighteen” of the New York School.
- August 4, 1920 – Helen Thomas born, American journalist, columnist, White House press corps member who covered eleven U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Obama; first woman officer of National Press Club, first woman member of Gridiron Club, first woman member of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), and the WHCA’s first woman president.
- August 4, 1923 – Mayme Agnew Clayton born, American librarian, and the founder and president of the Western States Black Research and Education center (WSBREC), the largest privately held collection of African-American historical materials in the world. WSBREC represents the core holdings of what is now the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum in Culver City California; for almost 50 years, Clayton single-handedly, using her own resources, collected over 30,000 rare and out-of-print books, newspaper clippings, movie posters, and sheet music – in all, some 3.5 million items. In 1969, she helped establish the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) African-American Studies Center Library, formed her own company, Third World Ethnic Books, and supported black filmmakers through the Black American Cinema Society.
- August 4, 1928 – Nadežda Mosusova born, Serbian composer, musicologist, and writer; professor and research fellow at the Stankovic Music School in Belgrade until her retirement in 1994.
- August 4, 1932 – Frances E. Allen born, American computer scientist; she went to college to become a high school math teacher, but instead became a pioneer in optimizing compilers, with seminal work in computer program optimization and parallel computing; first woman IBM Fellow; first woman recipient of the Turing Award (2006); also honored with a Computer Pioneer Award (2004) and as a Computer History Museum Fellow (2000). She died at age 88 on her birthday in 2020.
- August 4, 1938 – Ellen Schrecker born, American historian and professor; notable for American Inquisition: The Era of McCarthyism, and several other books on the McCarthy era, also Regulating the Intellectuals: Perspectives on Academic Freedom in the 1980s.
- August 4, 1940 – Frances J. Stewart born, British pre-eminent development economist, named one of fifty outstanding technological leaders in 2003 by Scientific American; director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at the University of Oxford; president of the Human Development and Capability Association (2008-2010); author of Technology and underdevelopment, Basic needs in developing countries, and Horizontal inequalities and conflict: understanding group violence in multiethnic societies.
- August 4, 1943 – Barbara Saß-Viehweger born in what was then the Province of Saxony; German lawyer, civil law notary, and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician; member of the Abgeordnetenhaus (a representative assembly governing non-federal regional matters) of Berlin (1975-1995), where she was speaker of the CDU caucus, and chair of the Enquete-Kommission (inquiry commission) for Abgeordnetenhaus administration reform; member of the communal parliament in Steglitz (1971-1975).
- August 4, 1944 – A Dutch informer betrays the hiding place of Anne Frank’s family and their friends. The Gestapo arrested all ten of them and the two Christians who helped them. Anne and her sister died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen, less than two months before the camp was liberated by British forces in 1945. Only Anne’s father Otto survived.
- August 4, 1958 – Allison Hedge Coke born, American poet and editor of mixed Native American and European heritage. Her debut collection, Dog Road Woman, won a 1998 American Book Award. She has since written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She has worked as a mentor and teacher on reservations, in urban areas, in juvenile facilities, mental institutions, in prisons, with migrant workers and urban at-risk youth. She also founded and directed youth and labor outreach programs in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
- August 4, 1962 – Lori Lightfoot born, American attorney and Democratic politician; elected in 2019 as mayor of Chicago, the first black LGBTQ+ woman to be Chicago’s mayor, and the second woman after Jane Byrne to be elected to the office. In addition to her law practice, she had previously served on the Chicago Police Board and Task Office (2015-2018), worked in the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications (2004-2005); and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney (1996-2002). Lightfoot has also been on the boards of the Illinois chapters of NARAL and the ACLU.
- August 4, 1970 – Kate Silverton born, English journalist and BBC News and BBC Radio 4 presenter. She was a co-presenter with historian Dan Snow of the live coverage of the celebrations of the 90th Birthday of the Royal Air Force at RAF Fairford airfield.
- August 4, 1971 – Bethan Benwell born, British linguist and author; since 2008, a senior lecturer in English language and Linguistics at the University of Stirling; co-investigator (2007-2010) on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project Devolving Diasporas: Migration and Reception in Central Scotland, 1980–present; she and co-author Elizabeth Stokoe were nominated for the 2007 British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Book Prize for Discourse and Identity.
- August 4, 1975 – Jutta Urpilainen born, Finnish politician; Deputy Prime Minister of Finland (2011-2014); Minister of Finance (2011-2014); Leader of the Social Democratic Party (2008-2014); Member of Parliament for the Vaasa constituency since 2003.
- August 4, 1983 – Greta Gerwig born, American actress, screenwriter, and director; co-writer and co-director of Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), and Nights and Weekends (2009). In 2017, she wrote the screenplay for her solo directorial debut, the comedy-drama, Lady Bird, which won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture–Musical or Comedy, and was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
- August 4, 2006 – Single Working Women’s Day is started by Barbara Payne, co-founder of the Single Working Women’s Affiliate Network, for both young women just joining the workforce and all the single-parent moms (almost one-third of American families today).
- August 4, 2010 – The state government of Malaysia and its Islamic Religious Council announced that it will allow Muslim girls under age 16 and boys under 18 to be married, claiming it will reduce the number of babies born out of wedlock; Minister for Women Shahrizat Abdul Jalil called the decision “morally and socially unacceptable.”
- August 4, 2019 – Dame Vera Baird, the new Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, called for increased support for domestic abuse victims after Abigail Blake’s violent ex-partner was given early release from prison. He was let out just six months after he was sentenced to three years and four months in a plea bargain, for breaking Blake’s back and neck, and her ribs, which punctured one of her lungs, leaving her permanently disabled. He was given a travel warrant and was allowed to make his way from Wrexham prison to his family’s home in Berkshire without a police escort, prompting Blake to go into hiding for 24 hours. Blake, mother of two, described her situation: “He left me for dead and now he is out. This is a daily hell, and will be for years. Forever looking over my back, laying in bed paralysed hearing sounds. Scared to death for the children and I. This is not living, this is existing, all while for Sebastian it’s the start of a new life having had zero punishment [because of] his abysmal sentencing.” Baird said she will meet with Abigail Blake to discuss her case.
- August 4, 2020 – Daisy Coleman committed suicide at age 23. She was 14 years old when she went to a party in January, 2012, where she was plied with liquor and raped after she passed out by a 17- year-old HS football player, whose grandfather was a powerful former Missouri state representative. A 15-year-old boy was accused of raping Coleman's 13-year-old friend, and a third boy admitted to recording the assault on a cellphone. There were national headlines and a major outcry in 2013 when the county prosecutor dropped both felony and misdemeanor charges against the first boy, and also dropped the felony sexual exploitation charge against the third boy. In 2014, a special prosecutor was put in charge to reinvestigate the case. The first boy pleaded guilty to misdemeanor second-degree endangerment of the welfare of a child, for leaving her unconscious on the front lawn of her home in sub-freezing temperatures, and he was sentenced in juvenile court by the Missouri Circuit Court Judge to four months in jail, suspended in favor of two years of probation. Coleman was the target of daily bullying during the aftermath of the assault, and her family moved to another town in Missouri after their home was damaged in a suspicious fire, but their new home was also damaged in a fire. Coleman and her older brother Charlie became advocates for sexual assault survivors. She founded SafeBAE (Before Anyone Else), a non-profit organization aimed at ending sexual assaults in schools. In 2018, her younger brother Tristan was killed in a car accident at age 19, and she moved to Colorado. She had made several previous attempts at suicide as she battled depression and PTSD. Coleman participated in two documentaries, Audrey & Daisy (2016), and Saving Daisy (2019).
- August 4, 2021 – Scientists from the universities of Cambridge, Exeter, and Copenhagen, studying the genes of over 200,000 women, have discovered a series of nearly 300 genetic signals they say could help identify why some women are predisposed to early menopause, the health consequences of going through menopause early, and whether these signals can be manipulated to improve fertility. Two genes, called CHEK1 and CHEK2, already known from studies of mice, have been key to identifying the genetic signals. CHEK1, when overexpressed in mice, extended the offspring’s reproductive lifespan, and when CHEK2 was inhibited in mice, it had a similar effect of a longer reproductive life span.
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- August 5, 1529 – The Treaty of Cambrai is signed, after negotiations conducted primarily by Louise of Savoy for the French and Margaret of Austria for her nephew, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V; also known as the Paix des Dames, or the Ladies’ Peace.
- August 5, 1565 – Paola Massarenghi born, Italian composer; her only composition to survive is a spiritual madrigal, called Quando spiega l’insegn’al sommo padre.
- August 5, 1833 – Carola of Vasa born, a titular princess of Sweden, who became Queen consort of Saxony, noted for her support of expanding medical services, women’s education, and her leadership in reorganizing the health care system of Saxony. She was the co-founder of the Albert-Vereine, which was a women’s association of the Red Cross; founded the Carola Haus hospital; a wet nurse school; a school for women in Schwarzenberg; and a women’s employment agency. She also founded Gustavheim, a home for the aged and infirm; and a home for the handicapped.
- August 5, 1876 – Mary Ritter Beard born, American historian and author, social justice and women’s rights activist; On Understanding Women, America Through Women’s Eyes, and Woman As Force In History: A Study in Traditions and Realities.
- August 5, 1880 – Gertrude Rush born, American lawyer, author, and civil rights and woman suffrage activist; first black woman attorney in Iowa; in 1921, she was elected president of the Iowa Colored Bar Association. When she and several other Midwestern black lawyers were denied admission to the American Bar Association in the early 1920s, they founded the National Bar Association, which incorporated in 1925, in Des Moines, Iowa. A Monumental Journey, a public art project undertaken by the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation to honor Gertrude Rush and the other 11 original organizers of the National Bar Association, was completed in July 2018.
- August 5, 1880 – Ruth Sawyer born, American author of fiction and nonfiction for adults and children; her children’s book Roller Skates won the 1937 Newbery Award.
- August 5, 1882 – Anne Acheson born in Ireland, British-Irish sculptor and inventor who exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1913. During the WWI she volunteered to work for the Surgical Requisites Association at Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, London, where she was the co-inventor with sculptor Elinor Hallé of plaster casts for soldier’s broken limbs, which speeded the healing time by stabilizing and supporting the broken limb. She and Hallé were both awarded CBEs for their contribution in 1919. Acheson was the first woman elected to be a fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, and received the Gleichen Memorial Award in 1938. During WWII, she retrained as a precision engineer and draftswoman to enable her to do further volunteer work.
- August 5, 1888 – Bertha Benz drives from Mannheim to Pforzheim – the first long-distance automobile trip, and the first made by a woman; now called the Bertha Benz Memorial route.
- August 5, 1891 – Harriet Spiller Daggett born, American academic, lawyer, schoolteacher, and law professor; She graduated from Louisiana State University (LSU), studying while her children were at school, earning her AB in government (1923), AM (1925), LLB in 1926 and her MA in 1928. She was an instructor at the School of Government from 1925, admitted to the Louisiana bar in 1926, and also became an instructor in the LSU Law School in 1926, one of the first women to be on the faculty of a U.S. law school. She attended Yale Law School for one year to earn her JSD in 1929, and became an LSU Law School associate professor in 1930. In 1931, she became the first woman to be a full professor at an ABA-approved AALS-member college (Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong became a tenured law professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1933, and Margaret Harris Amsler was the third woman tenured law professor to be appointed, at Baylor University Law School in 1941). Spiller Daggett retired as a Professor Emeritus in 1961. She specialized in mineral rights, community property, and domestic relations. She published The Community Property System of Louisiana in 1931, and Mineral Rights in Louisiana in 1939, both leading works. She was also Chair of the Louisiana Library Commission, and co-founded the Family Court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
- August 5, 1902 – Irene Rice Pereira born, American abstract artist, poet, author, and philosopher; a significant contributor to the development of modernism in the U.S. in 1935, she was one of the founders of the Design Laboratory, a cooperative school of industrial school under the auspices of the Federal Works Progress Administration. The curriculum of the Design Laboratory was similar to that of the Bauhaus school in Germany. Students experimented with materials in laboratories in order to understand their physical properties. There was an emphasis on social considerations, and students were taught the social implications of technological developments alongside classes in art, music, and literature. Pereira taught classes in painting, composition, and design synthesis. She began exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s at the ACA Galleries and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she, along with Georgia O’Keefe and Loren MacIver, were among the first women to be given a retrospective at a major New York museum.
- August 5, 1918 – Betty Oliphant born, Canadian ballet dancer and co-founder National Ballet School of Canada.
- August 5, 1926 – Betsy Jolas born in Paris, French-American composer; important figure in post-WWII French modernist music, she is a composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music, as well as opera; Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (1985), and Officier de la Légion d'honneur (2006).
- August 5, 1932 – Tera de Marez Oyens born, Dutch composer and Reformed church cantor; noted for her chamber music and song cycles, and electronic music compositions. In 1995, she was commissioned to write Unity, a piece for the 50th anniversary celebration of the United Nations.
- August 5, 1946 – Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson born, American nuclear physicist; first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); President of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 1999; Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board during the Obama administration (2014-2017), and Chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Clinton administration (1995-1999), the first woman to hold that position. Noted for her work on elementary particle theory, subatomic particles, and semiconductor systems.
- August 5, 1947 – France Anne Córdova born, American astrophysicist and administrator. She is the current director of the National Science Foundation (since 2014). President Obama appointed her to the Smithsonian Board of Regents (2009-2014), and she served as its Chair (2012-2014). She was President of Purdue University (2007-2012). Córdova was Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Vice-Chancellor for Research (1996-2002), then Chancellor (2002-2007) at the University of California, Riverside. She was the youngest person and first woman to be appointed as NASA Chief Scientist (1993-1996). Córdova was head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University (1989-1993). She worked at and became Deputy Group Leader at the Space Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (1979-1989). Her research has been in observational and experimental astrophysics, multi-spectral research on x-ray and gamma ray sources, and space-borne instrumentation. She originally got a BA in English, because everyone she knew said it was “more practical” because she was “just going to get married anyway,” and she didn’t know any scientists. But her feeling that science was where she belonged wouldn’t go away, so she went back to school, earning a PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1979, the year of her 32nd birthday.
- August 5, 1974 – Kajol born as Kajol Mukherjee; highly successful Hindi film actress, winner of six Filmfare Awards, and honoured by the Indian government in 2011 with Padma Shri, its 4th highest civilian honour. She is also a social activist, noted for her work with widows and children. Kajol has campaigned for Shiksha, an NGO which promotes children’s education, as well as fundraising for the Cancer Patients Aid Association, and is a patron of the Loomba Trust, which supports widows and their children. In 2012, she made a documentary for the Government of Maharashtra's campaign "Save the Girl Child."
- August 5, 2010 – The U.S Senate confirms Elena Kagan as the Supreme Court’s fourth woman justice by a vote of 63-37.
- August 5, 2017 – Venezuela’s new Constitutional Assembly ousted the nation’s top prosecutor, Luisa Ortega, sending guards in riot gear to keep her from her office. Ortega, a critic of President Nicolas Maduro, was replaced by one of Maduro’s supporters. Multiple nations, including the U.S., do not recognize the validity of Maduro’s claim to have won the 2018 election. The International Criminal Court began an investigation in 2021 of Maduro’s government for crimes against humanity.
- August 5, 2019 – New Zealand announced a bill to legalise abortion for all women that would reclassify terminations as a health matter rather than a crime. The justice minister, Andrew Little, announced the bill which would bring New Zealand law into line with many other developed countries. The bill permits the termination of pregnancy for up to 20 weeks of pregnancy and removed abortion from the Crimes Act 1961. After 20 weeks, abortion is permitted only if a health practitioner deems it "clinically appropriate" and consults at least one other health practitioner. Abortion is only illegal if a person who is not a licensed health practitioner procures or performs an abortion. On March 18, 2020, the Abortion Legislation Bill 2020 was passed.
- August 5, 2020 – The British Medical Association (BMA) has found a strong pattern of highly experienced women leaving general practitioner partnerships, ending their positions as clinical leaders and directors, and leaving medicine early. They are leaving because of their struggles to cope with menopause symptoms, with no support from management or peers. Many hospitals fear understaffing has become so severe that patients’ health could be damaged: there are currently more than 30,000 female doctors aged 45-55, when menopause typically occurs. This number will rise significantly as the new cohort of medical students progress, since almost 60% of them are women. “It is extremely concerning to find that some women may be permanently stepping back from senior positions in medicine – a key cause of the gender pay gap – and the health service may be losing highly experienced staff because of inflexibility and a lack of support during a relatively short phase of life,” said Dr Helena McKeown, BMA representative body chair. “The health service is under immense pressure and we cannot afford to lose experienced doctors because of a lack of flexibility and support.”
- August 5, 2021 – VkusVill, a Russian supermarket chain, featured a lesbian woman and her family in an ad, causing a conservative backlash. The company quickly pulled the ad, replacing it with one featuring a heterosexual family, and issued a public apology. Russian liberals and LGBTQ+ allies called out the company’s “cowardice” and called for a boycott. But the women who appeared in the original ad, Mother Yuma, daughters Mila and Alina, and Alina’s girlfriend, were forced to flee to Spain after being targeted by a hate campaign, and losing their work and their home. Yuma said before they left: “I was just knocked back by comments to my granddaughter, where some people wrote that they wanted to rape her, kill her, stab a child who is just sitting and smiling in the photograph. I’m most afraid for my granddaughter.” After they reached Spain, Yuma posted on Instagram, “We are safe, we are resting. We don’t have to hide our happiness to be a family. A huge thank-you to those who supported us, to those who risked speaking out in our support, and those who supported us personally. Thanks to you, we didn’t give in. For all of us this was a difficult experience, we’re all in a difficult state of mind. But the sea, sun and kindness are healing us.”
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- August 6, 1619 – Barbara Strozzi born, Italian Baroque singer and composer; one of the few women of the day to have her compositions published during her lifetime, which were mostly secular vocal music. She is also likely the author of some of the lyrics put to her music.
- August 6, 1774 – Shaker Founder ‘Mother’ Ann Lee and a small group of her followers arrive in New York from Great Britain, where she had been arrested and jailed multiple times.
- August 6, 1817 – Zerelda Wallace born, American lecturer, temperance advocate, and suffragist, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on women’s suffrage.
- August 6, 1848 – Susie King Taylor born, African-American U.S. Civil War nurse, author, and educator; she was born as a slave on a Georgia plantation, but allowed as a 7-year-old child to live with her grandmother in Savannah, where she learned to read and write in an illegal school run by Mrs. Woodhouse, a free black woman, and then extended her education with the help of two white youths, who knowingly broke the law against teaching slaves. But she was returned to her mother after her grandmother was arrested at a church meeting for singing freedom hymns. The Union took the area not long after, and she went with her uncle’s family under Union protection, eventually arriving at St. Simon’s Island in 1862. The commanding officers, discovering she was literate, offered the 14-year-old Susie a position running a school for children and adults. That same year, she married Edward King, a noncommissioned officer with the unit she would serve as an unpaid volunteer, the first black U.S. Army nurse. During the next three years, she also taught several of the soldiers to read and write. In 1866, she and her husband returned to Savannah, but he died there in an accident a few months later. She became the first African-American to teach former slaves openly in Georgia, where she taught children during the day and adults at night, but was not able to earn enough from teaching, and worked as a laundress at a military camp. By the 1870s, she was working as a domestic servant, and traveled to Boston with the family that employed her. There she met Russell L. Taylor, who became her second husband in 1879, and she settled in Boston for the rest of her life. In the 1890s, she wrote her memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, the only record by an African American woman of her experiences during the Civil War to be published (privately) in 1902. She died in 1912, at the age of 64.
- August 6, 1862 – Elizabeth Robins born, American playwright, actress, novelist, and campaigner for woman suffrage, who lived most of her adult life in England. She married a fellow actor in 1885, but he resented her greater success as an actress, and her refusal to leave the stage. In 1887, he killed himself by jumping off a bridge, leaving a suicide note which said, “I will not stand in your light any longer.” The following year, she moved to London, and remained for the rest of her life. She formed a jointly-managed company with Marion Lea and mounted Ibsen plays, including Hedda Gabler. When Lea married playwright Langdon Mitchell and returned to America, Robins produced independently The Master Builder and Little Eyolf. With William Archer she created the New Century Theatre, producing and acting in John Gabriel Borkman and Echegaray's Mariana. In 1902, at age 40, she retired from acting, and focused on writing, having already published several novels and a collection of short stories, some under the pen name C.E. Raimond. She began attending open-air meetings of the suffrage movement, and in 1907 her novel The Convert was published. The Convert was expanded from her play, Votes for Women, considered the first suffrage drama. She was a member of both the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and the Women’s Social and Political Union, although she broke with the WSPU when its protests became more violent. In 1909, she met Octavia Wilberforce, who, because she insisted on pursuing a career as a doctor, had been disinherited by her father, a man regarding careers as ‘unsexing’ for women. Robins and other friends provided financial and moral support until she succeeded in becoming a physician. Dr. Wilberforce was the great-granddaughter of William Wilberforce, noted British abolitionist. Just as she had documented Suffrage politics in her 1913 Way Stations, Robins contributed regularly to Time and Tide, a feminist magazine, including the campaign to allow women to enter the House of Lords. Her friend Margaret Haig was the daughter of Viscount Rhondda, who designated his daughter in his will as the inheritor of his title. In 1918, when her father died, Haig became Viscountess Rhondda, but the House of Lords refused to allow her to take her seat. Women were not admitted to the House of Lords until 1958. In the 1920s, Robins wrote Ancilla’s Share: An Indictment of Sex Antagonism, and other books which explored sexual inequality. She stayed an independent single woman, but enjoyed long friendships with George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Lady Florence Bell. Robins lived to the age of 89, dying in 1952, less than three months before her 90th birthday.
- August 6, 1886 – Inez Milholland Boissevain born, labor lawyer, suffrage leader, WWI correspondent, and orator; noted for leading the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 in Washington DC on a white horse. During her years at Vassar College she was once suspended for organizing a women's rights meeting. The president of Vassar had forbidden suffrage meetings, but Milholland and others held regular "classes" on the issue, along with large protests and petitions. Defying the campus ban on suffrage meetings, she convened one in a cemetery across the road. She enrolled 2/3 of the student body as suffragists, and taught them the principles of socialism. After graduating from Vassar, she applied for admission to study law at Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge, but was denied because she was a woman. Milholland earned her LL.B. degree from the New York University School of Law in 1912. She was admitted to the New York Bar, and handled criminal and divorce cases, but also investigated conditions at Sing Sing prison, so she became involved in prison reform. She campaigned for world peace, and was an active member of the NAACP, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the National Child Labor Committee. She played a prominent role in the National Woman’s Party, leading many suffrage parades before the 1913 parade in Washington D.C.
- August 6, 1894 – Paula Fürst born, German-Jewish reform educator who was forced to resign from teaching in 1933 at the first Montessori school in Berlin by the Nazi regime. She then taught at a Zionist School until 1938, when Rabbi Leo Baeck appointed her as head of all the Jewish schools in Germany. Fürst often accompanied children of the Kindertransport to London, but always returned to Germany, even as conditions worsened radically. She was arrested in June, 1942, and deported to Minsk. There are no further records of her, but historians believe she died in a death camp, possibly Auschwitz, later that year.
- August 6, 1903 – Virginia Durr born, civil rights activist, author, and founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare (1938).
- August 6, 1908 – Maria Ludwika Bernhard born, Polish classical archaeologist and specialist in Greek Art. During the WWII German occupation of Poland, she was active in the Polish Resistance as a liaison officer of the Home Army and worked in communications. Bernhard also helped guard the art collections at the National Museum of Warsaw. She was arrested in 1940, and sent to Pawiak, a Gestapo prison. At the end of the war, she was released from prison, and became Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. She was also curator of the Ancient Art gallery at the National Museum (1945-1962). In 1957, she became the chair of the Department of Classical Archaeology at Jagiellonian University. She wrote the Polish-language four-volume History of Ancient Greek Art, and the seven-volume Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.
- August 6, 1908 – Helen Jacobs born, American tennis star who served as a commander in U.S. naval intelligence during WWII, one of only five women to achieve that rank in the U.S. Navy at the time.
- August 6, 1911 – Lucille Ball born, American actress and producer; best known as the star of the television series I Love Lucy (1951-1957). She was the first woman to head a major television studio, Desilu Productions.
- August 6, 1912 – The Progressive ‘Bull Moose’ Party holds their convention at the Chicago Coliseum; Jane Addams gives the seconding speech nominating Theodore Roosevelt as their presidential candidate, a first for a woman. Unlike Republicans and Democrats, the Progressive Party fully endorses women’s suffrage, in addition to advocating for child labor laws, and an 8-hour workday. Though they disagreed on how to end child labor, and gain suffrage for women – Addams favored federal laws, while Roosevelt wanted to stay with a state-by-state approach – they admired and respected each other. Roosevelt thanked Addams for her nominating speech in a telegram: “I prized your action not only because of what you are and stand for, but because of what it symbolizes for the new movement.”
- August 6, 1917 – Barbara Cooney born, American children’s author and illustrator, honored with two Caldecott Medals, for Chanticleer and the Fox (1958), and Ox-Cart Man (1979); then won a National Book Award for Miss Rumphius (1982). She was also a nominee in 1994 for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for children’s authors.
- August 6, 1920 – Selma Diamond born, Canadian-American writer for radio and television, and actress, whose family moved to New York when she was a child, giving her distinctive, raspy voice a Brooklyn accent. She wrote for a number of radio series in the 1940s, including Duffy’s Tavern, and was a staff writer for The Big Show (1950-1952). She moved to television, writing for Your Show of Shows (1952-1954), Caesar’s Hour (1954-1957), and Kraft Music Hall (1958-1963). In the 1960s and 1970s, she became a frequent guest on the Jack Paar Show, and the Tonight Show. Best remembered now for playing Bailiff Selma Hacker on the TV show Night Court, until her death from lung cancer in 1985.
- August 6, 1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel.
- August 6, 1926 – Elisabeth Beresford born in France, British author of children’s books, known for creating The Wombles of Wimbleton Common, who “make good use of bad rubbish.”
- August 6, 1930 – Abby Lincoln born as Anna Marie Woolridge, adopted the name Aminata Moseka after a 1970s tour of Africa, American singer-songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist.
- August 6, 1942 – Netherlands Queen Wilhelmina is first reigning queen to address U.S. Congressional joint session.
- August 6, 1942 – Radhia Cousot born in Tunisia, the only woman in her class at the Polytechnic School of Algiers – she was also ranked first in her class. French computer scientist known for inventing abstract interpretation, a theory of sound approximation of the semantics of computer programs, a way of gaining information about control- and data-flow. One key notion is “widening”, a safe and not-too-imprecise approximation cyclic flow (as in a loop), where a precise computation might require an infinite number of computations and infinite time. Abstract interpretation has since been applied broadly, in areas including program optimization, software security, and test coverage analysis, and she and her husband Patrick are considered its chief proponents.After working as an associate research scientist at the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble, she was appointed in 1980 to the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, where she rose through the research ranks to the senior level to head the research team “Semantics, Proof and Abstract Interpretation” in 1991, and then on to the École normale supérieur (2006-2014); honored with the IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award in 2014.
- August 6, 1954 – Elma Miller born, Canadian composer, clarinetist, and writer; known for chamber music, orchestral music, electronic music, and vocal music. She has also taught music theory and orchestration at Toronto University, and was the artistic director of the contemporary chamber music series "Music Here & Now." In 1981, she won the bronze Sir Ernest MacMillan Award given by the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada for her orchestral composition Genesis.
- August 6, 1961 – Mary Ann Sieghart born, English journalist, wrote a weekly political column for The Independent; BBC Radio 4 presenter of Start the Week; chair of the Social Market Foundation, an independent think tank.
- August 6, 1962 – Michelle Yeoh born, Malaysian actress, martial artist, and film producer; best known as an actress for her performances in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, and in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for which she had to learn Mandarin phonetically, since she spoke Malay, English and Cantonese. In 2002, she co-produced the English-language film, The Touch, through her production company, Mythical Films. In 2008, she filmed a documentary in Vietnam for the Asian Injury Prevention Foundation (AIPF). After portraying Aung San Suu Kyi in The Lady in 2011, she was blacklisted by the Myanmar government, and refused entry into the country. Yeoh is a patron of the Save China’s Tigers project, committed to protecting the endangered South China tiger.
- August 6, 1964 – Kemi Omololu-Olunloyo born, Nigerian journalist, and controversial activist against gun violence while living in Canada. She was deported from Canada in 2012. "Sometimes, as a cop, in order to keep the streets safe, you have to dance with the wolves," Constable Scott Mills of the Toronto police said. "I don't want to call Kemi a wolf, because I think she has a good heart. I just think, on more than one occasion, she hurt the cause more than she helped it. [But] at the same time, not only in Toronto but in other jurisdictions, we have solved some major incidents because of her work." Since returning to Nigeria, she campaigns against male prostitution; Omololu-Olunloyo has appeared on international news programs to discuss terrorism.
- August 6, 1965 – The Voting Rights Act outlaws the discriminatory literacy tests that had been used to prevent African Americans from voting. Suffrage is finally fully extended to African American women.
- August 6, 1967 – Lorna Fitzsimons born, British Labour politician, member of Parliament for Rochdale (1997-2005); President of the National Union of Students (1992-1994).
- August 6, 1973 – Vera Farmiga born, American actress, director, and producer; she portrayed the Polish-American suffragist Ruza Wenclawska in the 2004 HBO film Iron Jawed Angels. She made her directorial debut with the 2011 film Higher Ground, in which she also starred. She was executive producer on the 2017 documentary film Unspoken, about Emma Zurcher-Long, who was diagnosed at age 2½ with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and taught herself to read and write. Farmiga was at the 2017 Women’s March in Vancouver with her daughter and husband, and was one of over 300 women in the entertainment industry to lend her name to the Time’s Up movement, to end sexual harassment and inequality in the workplace.
- August 6, 1991 – Takako Doi, leader of the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), and campaigner for human rights, became the first woman speaker of Japan’s House of Representatives. She never married. "My love for the constitution is so intense," she once said, "I remained wedded to it and have remained single." Takado Doi died at age 85 in 2014.
- August 6, 2009 – The U.S. senate votes 68-31 to confirm Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic, and third woman, Supreme Court Justice.
- August 6, 2018 – A U.S. federal court became the second to rule against Donald Trump's updated policy barring certain transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. Trump banned transgender service members in 2017, citing concern over medical costs and distractions. Facing a challenge, he tweaked the plan in March to focus the restrictions on transgender people affected by a condition called gender dysphoria. The administration asked U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington to lift her injunction against Trump's original ban, arguing that the new policy is not a total ban because it only bars people who need or have undergone gender transition. Kollar-Kotelly disagreed and said the new policy essentially amounts to a total ban because it requires people to serve "in their biological sex."
- August 6, 2019 – Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale, banned beers with sexist names or imagery from its flagship event, the Great British Beer Festival. A YouGov survey found that 68% of women beer drinkers would be unlikely to buy a beer with offensively male-oriented advertising. Last year the Society of Independent Brewers (Siba) drew up a new code of practice to outlaw marketing deemed to be sexist and offensive. Abigail Newton, the vice-chair of Camra’s national executive, said: “Consumer organisations like Camra have an important role to play in making women feel more welcomed within the beer world. This is the first time we’ve made such a bold statement with a ban. It’s hard to understand why some brewers would actively choose to alienate the vast majority of their potential customers with material likely to only appeal to a tiny and shrinking percentage. We need to do more to encourage female beer drinkers, which are currently only 17% of the market, despite the fact that they make up more than 50% of the potential market. Beer is not a man’s drink or a woman’s drink, it is a drink for everyone.”
- August 6, 2020 – Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden announced his plan to advance LGBTQ+ equality, saying he would make passage of the Equality Act a top legislative priority during his first 100 days as President, and ensure its immediate and full enforcement across all federal departments and agencies. He also pledged to increase funding for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
- August 6, 2021 – An assistant to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, during a meeting with sheriff’s officials, filed the first known criminal complaint against him, accusing him of groping her while they posed for a photograph. In response, Cuomo's personal lawyer Rita Glavin held a press conference in which she suggested the unnamed accuser was not alone with Cuomo at the Executive Mansion on the day in question, was sent there for different reasons than she has said, and did not indicate she had any misgivings about the encounter in emails to colleagues. Glavin and other lawyers for the executive chamber also used the news conference to question whether an explosive newly-released report conducted by New York Attorney General Letitia James concerning at least eleven allegations of sexual harassment against Cuomo was fair. Cuomo had no plans to resign, but dozens of New York Democrats asked him to step down or face impeachment. He resigned from office August 23, 2021.
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- August 7, 1560 – Elizabeth Báthory born, the “Blood Countess,” one of the first women serial killers in history; Hungarian torturer and murderer of hundreds of young women over a 24-year period.
- August 7, 1751 – Wilhelmina of Prussia, Princess of Orange born, leader of the dynastic stadtholder (hereditary stewards and officials) party and the counter revolution while married to William V of Orange.
- August 7, 1813 – Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis born, American abolitionist, feminist and educator, founder of the pioneering U.S. women’s rights newspaper, The Una; co-founder of the New England Woman Suffrage Association; she published her The History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement in 1870.
- August 7, 1848 – Alice James born, American diarist, chronicled her life and struggles with mental illness; sister of psychologist William James and novelist Henry James.
- August 7, 1864 – Ellen Fitz Pendleton born, American academic and administrator; Wellesley College president (1911-1936); acting president in 1910; Wellesley College dean (1902-1910); associate professor of mathematics and in charge of College Hall (1901-1902).
- August 7, 1876 – Mata Hari born as Margaretha MacLeod, Dutch exotic dancer; executed as a WWI German spy, but probably a double-agent for both the French and the Germans.
- August 7, 1887 – Anna Elisabet Weirauch born, German author and screenwriter; actress with the German State Theatre under Max Reinhardt; notable for Der Skorpion, a pioneering novel of lesbian literature.
- August 7, 1890 – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn born in New Hampshire, American feminist, labor activist, writer, organizer, and powerful orator for the International Workers of the World (IWW). She was only fifteen when she gave her first public speech, "What Socialism Will Do for Women," at the Harlem Socialist Club. The song “The Rebel Girl” was written about her by Joe Hill. She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), formed in 1920, and a principal activist for their International Labor Defense (ILD). She worked with feminist and IWW activist Marie Equi in Portland, Oregon, during the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike of 1934. She joined the Communist Party in 1936, and wrote a feminist column for The Daily Worker. During WWII, she campaigned for equal opportunity and equal pay for women workers, and set up day care centers for working mothers. Flynn was arrested in 1951 and prosecuted under the ‘Smith’ Act, the Alien Registration Act (which set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence and required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the federal government.) She was found guilty of advocating the overthrow of the government, and served two years in Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. She wrote The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner about her time there. She later became chair (1961-1964) of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA. She died at the age of 74 during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1964. She was accorded a state funeral with processions in Red Square, which was lined by a crowd of over 25,000 people, but her remains were returned to the U.S. as she wished, and were buried in Chicago, near Emma Goldman and other labor activists.
- August 7, 1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey becomes first to complete a cross-country automobile trip, traveling with three friends (none of whom could drive) for 59 days from New York, New York, to San Francisco, California.
- August 7, 1928 – Betsy Byars born, American children’s book author; won the Newbery Medal for The Summer of the Swans; also a National Book Award and Edgar Award winner.
- August 7, 1933 – Elinor Ostrom born, American political economist; she shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver Williamson, the first woman Nobel Laureate in Economics. In 2001, she was elected to U.S. National Academy of Science. She is noted for Ostrom’s Law: A shared resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory. She died at age 78 from pancreatic cancer on June 12, 2012, the same day that her last paper “Green from the Grassroots” was published.
- August 7, 1938 – Helen Caldicott born, Australian physician, author, and activist; outspoken opponent of nuclear power and weapons; radio host of If You Love This Planet. Now in her 80s, she is campaigning against climate change deniers.
- August 7, 1942 – Jane Fortune born, American author, journalist, women’s art expert, activist, and philanthropist; she was the cultural editor of The Florentine, an English-language newspaper in Tuscany (2005-2018), and wrote Mosaics, a column which led to publication of her guidebook, To Florence, Con Amore: 77 Ways to Love the City (expanded in the second edition to 90 Ways to Love the City). She spent many years tracing, documenting, and fighting to preserve, restore, and promote the women artists of the city. She wrote Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence, published in 2009, and co-authored with Linda Falcone, Art by Women in Florence: A Guide through Five Hundred Years (2012), which details where the work of women artists may be viewed in the public collections of Florence. She founded the Italian nonprofit, The Florentine Committee of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in 2005, and in 2009, she founded the American nonprofit, Advancing Women Artists Foundation (AWA), to research, restore, and exhibit art works by woman artists. Since AWA’s founding, over sixty restoration projects have been completed for drawings, paintings, and sculpture, concentrating on Florentine women artists, from the 16th through the 19th centuries, but also work by 19th century French sculptor Félicie de Fauveau. AWA also sponsors the Nelli Awards, given to modern women artists, curators, and restorers working in Florence. Initially, she funded the restoration of a painting in the San Marco Museum, Lamentation with Saints, a large-scale Renaissance painting by Suor Plautilla Nelli, Florence's earliest recognized woman painter to date. In 2008, David and Bathsheba, by Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, was restored. In 2015, the city of Florence bestowed on her its highest honor, the Fiorino d’Oro. In 2018, after Fortune died of cancer at age 76 in her Indianapolis home, a memorial mass was held for her at the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence.
- August 7, 1948 – American Alice Coachman won the women’s high jump competition in the Olympic Games in London, becoming the first black woman from any country to win an Olympic gold medal. Growing up in the Jim Crow era, she was denied access to regular training facilities, and had to train by running shoeless on dirt roads and creating her own equipment. Coachman was also the only American woman to win a medal in a sport during the 1948 summer games in London.
- August 7, 1953 – Anne Fadiman born, American journalist and essayist; won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for her non-fiction book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; a founding editor of the Library of Congress magazine Civilization.
- August 7, 1957 – Daire Brehan born, Irish stage and television actress, barrister, and BBC radio presenter; co-founder in 1985 of the theatre company Theatre Unlimited; was called to the Bar in 2002, practicing in criminal defense and prosecution; in 2005, became a member of the Inner Temple; elected in 2012 a Bencher of the Honorable Society of the Inner Temple. She died at age 55 of cancer in 2012.
- August 7, 1962 – Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey receives the U.S. President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service from President Kennedy for refusing to authorize thalidomide.
- August 7, 1968 – Francesca Gregorini born in Italy, Italian-American film director, scriptwriter and musician; made her directing debut on Tanner Hall, for which she also co-authored the screenplay; her film The Truth About Emanuel was selected for the dramatic competition at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
- August 7, 1969 – Dana G. Peleg born as Kiryat Bialik in the U.S.; Israeli writer, journalist, translator, editor, poet, and activist for women’s and LGBT rights. From 1996 to 2006, she wrote a column for At (You) magazine, the first regular column in the mainstream Israeli press on lesbian, bisexual and pansexual women. Peleg also wrote for the magazine Haim Aherim (A Different Life – 2003-2013). She wrote for the LGBT publication Hazman Havarod (Pink Times – 1997–2007). In 2000, she published her first collection of short stories, Te'enim, Ahuvati (Figs, My Love), and her poetry has appeared in LGBT magazines and anthologies.
- August 7, 1971 – Karen Blackett born, British advertising executive; CEO of MediaComUK (2011-2016) and MediaCom’s president since 2016.
- August 7, 1979 – Birgit Zotz born, Austrian cultural anthropologist and writer; noted for her knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, and studies of cross-cultural hospitality management; president of Komyoji, an intercultural institution.
- August 7, 1985 – Chiaki Mukai becomes Japan’s first woman astronaut, along with her male counterparts, Mamoru Mohri and Takao Doi.
- August 7, 1987 – Lynne Cox becomes first person to swim from the United States to the USSR, crossing from Little Diomede Island in Alaska to Big Diomede in the Soviet Union.
- August 7, 2010 – Elena Kagan is sworn in as the fourth woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
- August 7, 2012 – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a guest of honor at a dinner hosted by South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane in Johannesburg, was one of the first people out on the dance floor, laughing with jazz singer Judith Sephuma as they tried to outdo each other in dance moves. This was a break from serious business; Clinton was attending a conference on stopping the spread of AIDS in South Africa, which has the highest HIV infection rate in the world.
- August 7, 2019 – Cyntoia Brown, a sex trafficking victim who in 2006 was sentenced to life in prison over the murder of Johnny Allen, was released on parole, seven months after Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Haslam granted her clemency. Brown was 16 when she killed Allen, but she was tried as an adult. She said she acted in self-defense and that Allen had solicited her for sex after she was forced into prostitution, also saying that she believed Allen was going to kill her. Following her conviction, Brown would not have been eligible for parole until serving 51 years, but her sentence was commuted. Brown said she looks forward "to using my experiences to help other women and girls suffering abuse and exploitation."
- August 7, 2020 – New Hampshire Governor Christopher Sununu, a Republican, vetoed the Reproductive Health Parity Act passed by New Hampshire’s legislature in July, which would have required health insurance plans that cover maternity benefits to also cover abortion care. The Republicans won the majority in both New Hampshire’s House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2020 election, making it highly unlikely that the bill will be reintroduced.
- August 7, 2021 – California’s Department of Fair Employment filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, the multi-billion dollar company which produces the highly successful gaming series Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and the Candy Crush Saga. Activision Blizzard is accused of violating California’s civil rights and equal pay laws. The company’s president and its head of human resources stepped down following a walkout by hundreds of employees, and a petition signed by thousands more demanding a response to the scandal. Amanda Cote, a professor at University of Oregon who studies sexism and gender identity in the video game industry, said, “This is a particularly egregious lawsuit, but unfortunately I was not really surprised. We have known for quite some time that sexism pervades many areas of gaming … What seems to be different now is the fact that people are recognizing these issues as being systemic and repeated rather than episodic.” The lawsuit alleges female employees were routinely kicked out of lactation rooms so men could hold meetings. They were criticized for leaving the office to pick kids up from daycare while men played video games. One female employee noted that male employees would frequently approach her at the office and comment on her breasts. One example of the alleged “frat boy” atmosphere was a workplace tradition called the “cube crawl.” Drunken male employees would “crawl” their way between office cubicles and engage in inappropriate behavior towards female employees. Male co-workers at a holiday party allegedly passed around nude photos of a female colleague who was having an inappropriate relationship with her supervisor. The case also cites the former creative director for World of Warcraft, who was allegedly known to harass female colleagues and repeatedly bragged about his hotel room, which he called the “Cosby suite,” in reference to Bill Cosby. Executives made aware of his behavior told Afrasabi to participate in verbal counseling, “a slap on the wrist,” the lawsuit alleges. However, employees who spoke out were often targeted in retaliation, including being “deprived of work on projects, unwillingly transferred to different units, and selected for layoffs,” the lawsuit says. Beyond the crude jokes and offensive comments, women say Activision Blizzard fostered an environment in which their work was less valued and their careers overlooked. The company’s workforce was just 20% female, while all executive level positions are held by white males, the lawsuit alleges – including the CEO and president roles. Women were systematically paid less than their male counterparts, offered fewer promotions, and overlooked for appointments to leadership roles, the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit also contains claims of pregnancy discrimination, saying supervisors ignored medical restrictions given to female employees and gave them negative evaluations while they were out on maternity leave. When employees complained about such treatment, it “fell on deaf ears.” Experts say the fallout at Activision Blizzard could be a turning point in the gaming industry, as employees and the industry at large demand urgent change. Meanwhile, shareholders are now suing the Activision Blizzard, claiming they were “economically damaged” as a result of executives allegedly intentionally withholding information on the lawsuit. Employees at Activision Blizzard are not satisfied with the company’s response either. Following their walkout, organizers released a statement saying they would continue to make specific demands, including the end of forced arbitration for all employees, pay transparency, and greater worker participation in oversight of hiring and promotion policies and other company processes.
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- August 8, 1640 – Amalia Catharina born, Countess of Erbach born, German poet and composer; she published 67 Pietist poems and songs in 1692, meant for private household devotions.
- August 8, 1807 – Emilie Flygare-Carlén born, the most widely read Swedish novelist of her day; her early work was populated with seafaring folk, based on her childhood in the archipelago of Bohuslän. Her later work reflected her life in Stockholm, where her home became a meeting place for the city’s literati. She founded charitable endowments for the widows of fishermen, as well as scholarships for students. Noted for Ett köpmanshus i skärgården (The Merchant's House on the Cliffs) and Kyrkoinvigningen (The Magic Goblet), which was controversial for its honest treatment of divorce, rare in the 1840s.
- August 8, 1814 – Esther Hobart Morris born, abolitionist and suffragist; first woman Justice of the Peace in the U.S., appointed as J.P. in South Pass City, Wyoming, when the previous justice resigned in protest after Wyoming extended suffrage to women in December 1869. She served the remainder of the term, which expired in December 1870, but was not nominated for reelection by either the Republican or Democratic Party. South Pass City was a mining town, which went boom and bust several times. Morris left not only the town, but her husband, whom she had once had arrested for assault and battery. She moved several times, but attended the 1872 American Woman Suffrage Association Convention in San Francisco, then declined the nomination in 1873 by the Woman’s Party of Wyoming to be their candidate for the Wyoming Territorial Legislature. Morris served as Vice President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, addressing its 1876 National Convention in Philadelphia. In July, 1890, she presented the new Wyoming state flag to Governor Warren during the Wyoming statehood celebration. She died in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1902.
- August 8, 1857 – Cecile Chaminade born, French Romantic composer and pianist, in spite of her father’s disapproval; noted for character pieces for piano and salon songs, including Scarf Dance, The Silver Ring, and Flute Concertino in D Major; she was the first woman to receive the French Légion d’Honneur for music composition.
- August 8, 1863 – Florence Merriam Bailey born, American ornithologist, nature writer, and field guide author. She was an advocate for protecting birds, calling for birders to use binoculars instead of shotguns, and she denounced the fashion of using bird feathers and whole birds as decorations on women’s hats, which caused millions of birds a year to be killed. Author of Birds Through an Opera Glass. She organized Audubon Society chapters, and was co-author with her husband of Handbook of Birds of the Western United States and The Birds of New Mexico.
- August 8, 1884 – Sara Teasdale born, lyric poet, winner of the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Love Songs; also published Rivers to the Sea, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, and Helen of Troy. She married a businessman, Ernst Filsinger, who admired her poetry, in 1914, but his constant business travel caused her much loneliness, and in 1929, without telling her husband, she moved interstate for three months to satisfy the criteria for a divorce. She only notified him at her lawyer’s insistence as the divorce was going through. Filsinger was shocked. She died by suicide in 1933, overdosing on sleeping pills. She was 48 years old.
- August 8, 1896 – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings born, American author; won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Yearling.
- August 8, 1898 – Marguerite Bise born, French chef and restaurateur; notable as the third woman to win three Michelin stars, in 1951 as head chef of the restaurant Auberge du Père Bise which she founded with her husband in Talloires, Haute-Savoie, a lakeside resort town in southeastern France.
- August 8, 1913 – Yvonne Fontaine Fauge born, a member the French Resistance helped downed allied airmen in WWII, was also recruited by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Her SOE code names were ‘Nenette’ and ‘Mimi’ for the Tinker and Minister networks in France (1943-1944), and she was noted as “a highly successful and competent agent.” The Tinker network, based in Troyes in north-central France on the Seine River, was responsible for the destruction of six locomotives used by the Nazis, and helped 18 American airmen whose aircraft had been shot down to escape to Switzerland. Fontaine Fauge was both a courier, and a carrier of sabotage materials. The Germans were infiltrating and destroying many of the SOE networks, so the Tinker team was evacuated from France. Fontaine Fauge went with them, and underwent SOE training before returning to France by boat, making her way from Brittany to Paris, where she became part of the Minister network, continuing to work as a courier, as well as locating farm fields suitable for drops of arms and supplies for the French Resistance. The Minister network organised and carried out small-scale sabotage operations aimed at hindering German logistics and transport of supplies to the battlefields after D-Day. In July, 1944, a British SAS commando team radioed for help from the Forest of Fontainebleau. Minister team members rushed to the rescue, but were captured by the Nazis, and later executed. Fontaine Fauge became the sole surviving member of the team, and continued working with the Resistance until the area was liberated in late August, 1944. She was flown back to England in September. She was harshly critical of the British for sending SAS personnel in uniform into the area, which was very closely patrolled by SS troops, blaming this for the capture and execution of her teammates. Because of her attitude, she was never acknowledged by the British for her SOE work. The French government did award her the Medal of the Resistance. She died at age 82 in 1996.
- August 8, 1922 – Gertrude Himmelfarb born, American traditionalist historian, noted for works on Victorian England; among her many titles are Victorian Minds, and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians.
- August 8, 1927 – Maia Wojciechowska born in Poland, American children’s and young adult fiction author, Newbery Award for Shadow of a Bull.
- August 8, 1929 – Larisa Bogoraz born, Soviet linguist, author, and dissident for free speech and civil rights, she organized a protest in Red Square of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. She was exiled for four years to Siberia; co-author of Memory. Contributor to the Chronicle of Current Events (1968-1983), an underground periodical run by dissidents which reported violations of judicial procedure and civil rights by the Soviet government.
- August 8, 1933 – Serena Wilson born, American dancer, choreographer, and teacher; a pioneer in legitimizing belly dance in the U.S.; a student of Ruth St. Denis; television host of The Serena Show.
- August 8, 1937 – Sheila Varian born, American Arabian Horse breeder and trainer; received recognition for her work from the U.S. Equestrian Federation as one of the top ten breeders of Arabians in the country, and awarded the 2001 Ellen Scripps Memorial Breeders’ Cup to her; honored in 2005 with the Arabian Breeders Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
- August 8, 1942 – L.V. Hull born, self-taught African American artist; Vernacular Art Yardscape.
- August 8, 1948 – Svetlana Savitskaya born, Soviet cosmonaut, aerospace engineer, and test pilot who became the second woman in space aboard Soyuz T-7 in 1982; on her 1984 mission, she became the first woman to be in space twice, and the first woman to perform a spacewalk, in 1984. She was a test pilot from 1976 to 1980, when she joined the Russian space program. Previously, as an aviator, she set 19 women’s world records, and won the 1970 world aerobatics championship.
- August 8, 1948 – Margaret Urban Walker born, American philosopher, ethicist, and author; Moral Contexts, and Naturalized bioethics: toward responsible knowing and practice.
- August 8, 1958 – Deborah Norville born, American television journalist; anchor on the syndicated news magazine Inside Edition since 1995; on the Board of Directors of Viacom Corporation; worked for CBS News (1992-1995), including a stint as co-anchor on America Tonight; she hosted The Deborah Norville Show on ABC TalkRadio (1991-1992) after taking maternity leave; worked for NBC (1987-1990).
- August 8, 1959 – Caroline Ansink born, Dutch composer, musician, and music educator; won both a Composition Prize and a GEDOK for Pyrrhus for Organ in 1989.
- August 8, 1964 – Anastasia Ashman born, American author, blogger, digital strategist, and co-founder of the global branding startup GlobalNiche.net; she is noted for her books, Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, and The Thong Also Rises: Further Misadventures from Funny Women on the Road.
- August 8, 1969 – Executive order 11478 issued by President Nixon requires each federal department and agency to establish and maintain an affirmative action program of equal employment opportunity for civilian employees and applicants.
- August 8, 1970 – Janis Joplin buys a headstone for blues singer Bessie Smith’s unmarked grave, two months before her own funeral.
- August 8, 1973 – Ilka Agricola born, German mathematician in the field of differential geometry, concerned with its applications in mathematical physics; dean of mathematics and computer science at the University of Marburg.
- August 8, 2018 – The Senate of Argentina rejected, by a vote of 38 to 31, a bill that would have decriminalized abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. The nation’s current law only allows exceptions to the abortion ban in cases of rape, or severe risk to the woman’s health. During the Senate debate, the Roman Catholic Church held a “Mass for Life” at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral. After the vote was announced, police broke up several confrontations between advocates and opponents of the change outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires. A similar bill was introduced in May, 2019, in the Chamber of Deputies, Argentina’s lower house, which passed the bill by a vote of 129-121 in June 2019. The Senate again voted 38 to 31 against the proposed measure in August 2019. In December 2020, the Chamber of Deputies, Argentina’s lower house, narrowly passed a Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy Bill, which the Senate also passed two weeks later, allowing abortions during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. "It's law!" Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, minister of women, genders and diversity, wrote following the vote. "Today we took a huge step and we are getting closer to the Argentina we dream of. We are writing our destiny, we are making history."
- August 8, 2019 – Simone Biles was in tears as she expressed the anger and disappointment she feels about the handling of Dr. Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse. “I don’t mean to cry,” the usually poised Olympic champion said before attempting to win her sixth U.S. national title. “But it’s hard coming here for an organization having had them fail us so many times. And we had one goal and we’ve done everything that they’ve asked us for, even when we didn’t want to and they couldn’t do one damn job. You had one job. You literally had one job and you couldn’t protect us.” Over 260 women and girls were reportedly assaulted by Nassar, from the 1990s through 2016. Yet those who reported his abuse were disbelieved, dismissed, or ignored by coaches, administrators, counselors, police, and university-employed trainers until 2016, when Rachael Denhollander, a former gymnast who had become a lawyer, sent an email to the Indianapolis Star, after the paper had published the results of a five-month investigation into the mishandling of sexual abuse allegations by the national governing body of U.S. gymnastics. Her email read: “I recently read the article titled ‘Out of Balance’ published by the IndyStar. My experience may not be relevant to your investigation, but I am emailing to report an incident that may be. I was not molested by my coach, but I was molested by Dr Larry Nassar, the team doctor for USAG. I was 15 years old, and it was under the guise of medical treatment for my back.” She agreed to be named and tell her story on camera to the newspaper. Then for six months, she stood alone as the only woman to publicly accuse Nassar, with co-accuser Jamie Dantzscher only disclosing her identity months later. Then more and more victims started coming forward, even some who had signed non-disclosure agreements. Household names and Olympic medal winners like Biles, Gabby Douglas, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Jordyn Wieber came forward. Nassar was finally tried, convicted, and given a sentence of 40 to 125 years behind bars in 2018. Steve Penny, longtime leader of USA Gymnastics resigned, and all the USAG board members stepped down at the demand of the US Olympic Committee. A law firm was hired to investigate the US Olympic Committee’s own lack of follow-up to allegations against Nassar, which were revealed to them in 2015 after a USA Gymnastics investigation found possible criminal sexual abuse by Nassar.
- August 8, 2020 – Churails, a new Pakistani television drama, generated controversy in reviews even before its first episode aired. It includes a lesbian couple, women smoking and swearing, and episodes which tackle child abuse and domestic violence. Instantly dubbed “Lock, Stock and Four Smoking Burqas,” it’s the story of four women who start a detective agency to catch out cheating husbands, behind the façade of a burqa boutique. It’s written and directed by British Pakistani film-maker Asim Abbasi, who says, “Churails is a story about women on the fringes of society. In Pakistan, being a woman is the equivalent of being a sexual or ethnic minority because of the power dynamics of patriarchy. The series is very culturally specific, but also very universal . . . Because we are showing such a diverse range of women, it was important to show the entire spectrum of sexuality. It would have been wrong if they were all straight because not all women in Pakistan are straight . . . The reason the women open the detective agency is to level the playing field for everyone who identifies as a woman, so a transgender character who identifies as a woman should be included. The fact that she’s transgender is not addressed on the show and that is deliberate. It’s not that I was overlooking her identity or ashamed of it. It was to show the women coming to the agency were all equal.” He acknowledges that a series like this should have been made by a woman, but there’s no Pakistani woman yet with enough clout to get such a programme on air, so he hopes that this series will help break the ground for more women in writing and directing. Churails translates into English as “witches” but it is commonly used in Pakistan as an insult for rebellious women. Abbasi says, “The association of women who don’t conform with witchcraft is a global phenomenon, but in Pakistan specifically, any woman who is sexually and emotionally liberated, who has the ability to be aggressive when threatened is called a churail. We are taking it as a badge of honour.”
- August 8, 2021 – The United Nations has condemned the practice of child marriage in Zimbabwe following the death of a 14-year-old girl after she gave birth at a church shrine, an incident that caused outrage among citizens and rights activists. The government has typically turned a blind eye to the practice of child marriage within Zimbabwe’s apostolic churches, which also allow polygamy. Zimbabwe has two sets of marriage laws, the Marriage Act and Customary Marriages Act. Neither law gives a minimum age for marriage consent, while the customary law allows polygamy. A new bill being debated by parliament seeks to synchronise the laws, ban marriage of anyone below 18 years and prosecute anyone involved in the marriage of a minor. The UN in Zimbabwe said in a statement it “notes with deep concern and condemns strongly” the circumstances leading to the death of Memory Machaya, a 14-year-old girl from the rural area of Marange in the east of the country. One in three girls in Zimbabwe are likely to be married before turning 18. Police and Zimbabwe’s gender commission said they were investigating the circumstances that led to the girl’s death and burial. The girl died earlier in July 2021, but the case came to light only at the end of July after angry relatives, who were barred by the church’s security from attending her burial, told their story to the state-owned press. The apostolic churches, which shun hospitals, attract millions of followers with their promises to heal illnesses and deliver people from poverty. “What you see today, a young girl forced to marry, get pregnant, & dies, is not an aberration! It is part of the same continuum. Female persons are not seen as fully human, with individual rights, choice, rights to control our own bodies,” tweeted Everjoice Win, a feminist and rights activist, and director of programmes and global engagement for ActionAid International.
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Hard-Working Single Moms in Nature:
The Polar Bear
Polar bears are the largest terrestrial carnivores on earth, but their ferocious appetite doesn’t make them any less loving when it comes to their cubs. Mother bears tend to give birth to two cubs, although occasionally triplets will occur. The first order of business for an expectant polar bear mother is to dig a den deep in the snow where she'll have her cubs.
Once born, a polar bear’s cubs will stick by her side for over two years, soaking up all of her knowledge about survival in one of the harshest environments on earth. She will protect her cubs with her life, often from aggressive males who have no involvement in child raising and frequently attempt to cannibalize cubs. These brave mothers battle the elements and other bears to ensure their offspring have the greatest chances of success in the wild.
Polar bears are on the Most Endangered Species list. Only about 31,000 polar bears remain in the wild. They rely heavily on sea ice to access the high-fat food supply they need to survive. As global temperatures rise, sea ice is melting for longer periods each year or disappearing altogether, making it increasingly difficult for polar bears to hunt and carry out other life-sustaining tasks. As polar bears are forced onto land, they become undernourished and less capable of feeding their cubs.